rowlando's blog

Crystal Palace restaurants

Nick — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:05:14 +0000

Crystal Palace restaurants, from the top of my head, specialise in 16 different types of cuisines. These are:

chinese
thai
brazilian
portugese
spanish
indian
mexican
italian
caribbean
vietnamese
japanese
nepalese
venezuelan
french
french/algerian
gastropub (british)

I’ve eaten 10 of the 16. Must try harder!

Crystal Palace Festival 2011

Nick — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:45:05 +0000

The last time I posted to this blog was just under a year ago. I was living in Clapham South then. Now I live in Crystal Palace, which, having known nowt about it beforehand, is great for a number of reasons.

Now that I’m a home-owner (minus the mortgage) I feel more inclined to invest my time in my local community, connecting with people and generally making it a better place to live. One of the first opportunities I’ve come across is helping out in a very small way with the Crystal Palace Overground Festival.

The main day of the festival is on Saturday 13th August and I urge you to come down for a fun day. They’ll be live music, DJs, films, vintage shopping, poetry, kids activities, crafts, dance, arts workshop, antiques, food (I’m looking forward to the Venezuelan offering) and more. Check out the website for more details and I hope to see you there.

Clapham Common festival

Nick — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 19:44:43 +0000

Lots of free ice cream, helter skelter, air guitar experts, toe wrestling stage and some middle of the road rock made for a good Sunday at Clapham Common.

The pics were taken on my phone with a toy camera effect applied.

Come dine with Steve

Nick — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:07:39 +0000

On the menu last night was french onion soup, barley infused with lots of herbs and spices and tomatoes (i think) and Crème brûlée. Washed down with lots white wine.

Crème brûlée is french for “burnt cream” so Steve got out his blow torch and we took turns caramelising our desserts. Good shit!

Cup of tea – Truls’s final elevator journey

Nick — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:36:17 +0000

Annoying pigeon needs to die – Just Flock off!

Nick — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 07:47:16 +0000

Over the past 6 months Claire and I have endured a varying number of annoying pigeons. At first there were 3 or 4 pigeons, all cooing for attention. I stuck some old CDs on the kitchen and bedroom window sills to stop them from sitting there. This worked. The unforeseen consequence however is they now roost out of sight, on the roof or in the gutter just above our bedroom window.

I think the gutter is home to a single pigeon. I can only hear one pigeon in the morning. Other pigeons appear during the day, sitting on our neighbours window sill or roof. During the day it doesn’t bother me. It’s only the 5am wake up call, even on weekends! It gets to Claire more than me though.

I am seriously thinking about getting paid help. A Google search returns a surprising number of results for pest control services around our area:

Express Exterminations
Beaver Pest Control – their justification for killing pigeons makes me feel better about planning their deaths
Environ Pest Control – these guys have appeared on TV a lot so may cost a lot because they’re minor celebrities to some people. They have a pigeon page too.
The local council, Lambeth, have a pest control department. I think they might be a good first port of call.

Rentokil have an entertaining blog post about what not to do when it comes to bird control as demonstrated by films.

Skip to 1 min, 7 secs on the video below. I would quite like to do this right now:

A few quotes from Facebook/Twitter over the past few months:

Claire Smith is not one to stifle creativity but I wish the pigeon trying to imitate a fire alarm at 5.30am would shut the hell up!

Seriously, pigeon. Enough!

today is a good day! pigeon didnt coo til 7am, its payday and there doesn’t seem to be any drilling outside the office!

Another night of 4 hours sleep thanks to the feathered vermin nesting on the rooftop. I may actually wrestle the thing off the roof myself. Now to spend the next 7 hours in an overly warm office with drilling noises and sewer smells wafting the windows. I’m living the dream

i h8 pigeons!

Is it a tad ironic that Claire’s favourite Family Guy episode is the bird one? You can watch a longer version at Metatube.

Oh, I nearly forgot. I took a picture of a pigeon that look liked it had topped itself. It was hanging from a bridge in Battersea. I took pleasure in this and still do. Is that wrong?

Luke and Lucy’s train track

Nick — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:09:39 +0000

Breakfast at The Falcon

Nick — Mon, 10 May 2010 21:05:47 +0000

Breakfast at The Falcon, originally uploaded by rowlando.

We were going to eat at Recipease but due to time constraints, we ended up in The Falcon. Wrong move. It was the worth breakfast I have had in a long time. Good pub, very bad breakfasts!

Mimicking a toy camera’s look and feel

Nick — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:36:28 +0000

Last photoshop class Karl introduced us to toy cameras. He brought 2 cameras in, one of which was made by lomography. The ethos behind toy cameras is that there are no rules, just take photos without worrying what all the functions are on the modern day cameras. Toy cameras take film, usually square film, are plastic, cheap looking, have a single unknow fixed aperture and a button. The whole point is simplicity. Here are ten rules taken from the Lomography website:

Take your camera everywhere you go.
Use it any time – day and night.
Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it.
Try the shot from the hip.
Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible.
Don’t think. (William Firebrace)
Be fast.
You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film.
Afterwards either.
Don’t worry about any rules.

The photos taken by toy cameras have a number of common attributes. High contrast, sharp in the middle and blurred round the edges, vignetting. The characteristics displayed by cheap cameras are often unwanted, but these inperfections always lead to a unique, individualistic style.

In class we took a photo and used photoshop to erode the image so it looked like it was taken by a toy camera. Here’s my first attempt:

Before photoshop

After photoshop

Not too bad an effort. I tried again with a photo I took in Rome’s Navona Piazza.

Before photoshop

After photoshop

Alan, distorted

Nick — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:21:59 +0000

At tonight’s photoshop class I learnt about brushes. I downloaded a number of brushes, one a grid brush set by ~cubsocer10-stock. I took a photo, splatter some paint over it, played with opacity of the different layers, distorted Alan’s head with the Transform > Distort tool, copied the distored hairpiece and applied a number of filters. I quite like the result.

Before Photoshop

After photoshop